Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
My little library is taking shape
I’ve been working at converting our spare bedroom into a library/guest bedroom. It used to be a pink-striped nightmare (a little girl’s room, for parents who see their daughter as a little princess, no doubt), but we got it painted. Last weekend I assembled the bookshelves, and this last week we had a new ceiling fan installed. Nice dark blades instead of those peppy white blades. I bought a rug, too. It’s all coming together.
Today, we took delivery on more furniture: an easy chair and sofa bed. Sadly, the sofa bed would not fit through the door, even after we took the door off its hinges and took the legs off the sofa bed. My bad for not measuring the doorway and the sofa bed. I don’t think about such things. I really don’t. I guess I imagined that such things are standard, that no one would create a sofa bed that couldn’t fit through a doorway.
And so we left the sofa bed in the living room, which is making the cats very happy (much softer for their tushes than the black vinyl sofa we’ve owned since my residency). The black sofa is in the bedroom, which is less than ideal since it’s not a sofa BED.
Tonight, I unloaded five boxes of books, which is about 1/3 of what I need to unload. I’ve unloaded my Gaiman and my Burroughs and my Conrad. My Dick is still in the garage. (Philip K Dick, that is.) I unloaded my Shakespeare and my Shaw. My Martin Cruz Smith and my Crumley and my Goodis. Oh, and I discovered that I must have gone through one hell of a Roald Dahl phase, because we own a LOT of Dahl.
And then there are all those math, physics, and chemistry textbooks which will go to waste if Jake decides to become a botanist or a history major. Karen has some pretty heavy duty shit, I’m telling you. Complex analysis, exotic algebras for quantum mechanics. They’re the kind of books that don’t go bad, but I suspect they’re too high level even for our local Cal State library.
Yes, I should donate more of my books. It’s bizarre, really, even a little crazy to want to hang onto books I’ve read but have no intention of reading again, all because I liked them so much the first or second or third time through. I guess there’s no predicting what I might yet decide to re-read, but still . . . it’s nuts. I think I’ll go through the lot of them yet again, next time we move. Whenever that is.
Still to come: we need a little table next to the easy chair, and a reading light to go atop it.
D.
That does it. No more best sellers.
I finished Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones today. And oh, my.
Here’s the premise: 14-year-old Susie Salmon is raped, killed, and dismembered by a neighbor. She narrates the novel from “her heaven,” wherein she is perpetually 14, perpetually on her way to high school. Susie is, to put it mildly, obsessed with the living; although there are hints that others in her shoes eventually move on to a better place, she is content to haunt the living — her father, mother, siblings, the boy she had just kissed, the girl who brushed against Susie’s soul in its fevered rush from Earth, and even her murderer.
What The Lovely Bones does well is detail the way violent crime warps and devastates the lives of those close to the victim; Sebold also does a nice job showing that not all changes wrought by such a horror are bad. If Sebold had been content to leave these as her sole themes, if she had written a Susie-free novel, this would have been a fine book. Instead, we have a novel that can’t make up its mind between first person narration and omniscient POV. Because, yes, Susie is terribly omniscient, delving into her various subjects’ hearts and minds, their fears and desires, their most buried memories.
And yet we only occasionally see Susie’s reaction to what she witnesses. It’s so rare that when it happens, it stands out. To me, Susie eventually seemed less and less a character, more and more a manifestation of Sebold herself.
Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
And now I’m reading . . .
I feel like such a lemming: I’m reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Lemming because for a time, it seemed like everyone around me was toting this book.
I think I like it, but I’m not sure. It’s awfully manipulative at times. I feel like I’m reading the treatment for an old Steven Spielberg movie. (And sure enough, Spielberg executive produced the movie version of The Lovely Bones!) And somehow it doesn’t seem fair, selecting such charged subject material for the plot.
Eh, that’s all I got. Except for this.
D.
Slick
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Really written. I did put out a little over 1200 words last Saturday, but the writing was pedestrian and reminded me of nothing so much as the stuff I cranked out back in 2001, when I first started. And even that was exceptional, since it’s 1200 words more than I’ve written on any given day for the last two years.
But I can still appreciate slick writing — at least I have that.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead: This is the book I turned to after finishing Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — which was a fine read, but ultimately not very meaty. Rebecca Stead’s novel, on the other hand, has a similarly light touch, yet manages to weave a number of themes: the odd nature of childhood friendships, which can at once be superficial and miles-deep; the seemingly random cruelty of kids; the complexity of parent-child relationships. There’s even a little racism and class warfare stirred in, all in one skinny novel about time travel, The $10,000 Pyramid, and growing up in the 70s in New York City.
Miranda is a 12-year-old whose best friend Sal stops hanging out with her soon after he’s punched in the face and stomach by another kid. It’s easy for the reader to concoct theories to fit the data; perhaps Miranda reminds Sal of his humiliation, and that’s why he can’t tolerate her presence anymore? But this is a novel where little is as it seems, and while everything has a reason, the reader’s patience is rewarded only near the story’s end.
Soon after the punching incident, Miranda begins finding notes that are vaguely creepy and hint at a foreknowledge of the future. That the notes do, in a way, come from the future is hardly a spoiler; Miranda’s favorite book is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, and she and the other kids in the story expend some effort wrapping their heads around time travel concepts. The identity and purpose of the messenger is the true mystery, and for that we readers (and Miranda) must wait for the story to unfold.
Meanwhile, we’re treated to a realistic look at what it was like to be a grade-schooler in New York City in the late 70s, and yet this is not filler. What happens between Miranda and her friends is critical to the denouement.
And that’s all the review you get ‘cuz my brain is still not working well from the insomnia. It’s tough functioning on an average of four hours a night.
D.
Currently reading . . .
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Interesting thus far . . . it’s a murder mystery with a dog as the victim, a 15-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome as the sleuth. I’m not sure how well this novel gets inside the Asperger’s mind, but the arguments in the comments at Amazon suggest that even the Asperger’s parents are undecided on that one.
While on vacation, I finished Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Books like Blood Meridian always make me doubt my intellect. Am I too dense to figure this one out? Is the author being too obscure? I get the basic idea (evil is real, and eternal), I understand Holden (the judge), but why is he a judge? And what the hell is up with that epilogue?
I also finished Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End (note, the lack of apostrophe is intentional), in which the author created a believable near-future and populated it with a number of one- and sometimes two-dimensional characters. I’d had high hopes for the novel’s main character, Robert Gu, a celebrated poet whose decline into Alzheimer’s is rolled back by the miracles of modern medicine. Gu had been the sort of poet laureate who is loved by his fans but hated by everyone who knows him. As he sheds the last shadows of dementia, his old nasty personality returns. Does he make good, does he become a decent human being? SPOILER yes, but is his transformation believable? Not in the least. Add to that an ending that’s a clear setup for a sequel, one that leaves way too many questions unanswered*, and you are left with an all too common question when assessing hard SF: do all the clever ideas make up for the novel’s other shortcomings?
And then in desperation, with nothing left to read, I picked up the second Bartimaeus novel, The Golem’s Eye, which Jake had just finished. (I finished it earlier today, which is why I downloaded Curious Incident to my Nook.) If you’re not familiar with the Bartimaeus trilogy, you’ve missed a good one. I think Kate turned me onto this, if I remember correctly. It’s kiddy lit, but fairly dark stuff, certainly darker than the Harry Potter saga. The second novel isn’t as good as the first or third (as usual for a trilogy) but still had lots of good snark from our favorite djinn.
How about you folks — read anything good lately? I’d have to say that True Grit still ranks as the best thing I’ve read lately, but Curious Incident may give it a run for its money.
D.
*Including, most unforgivably, the identity of the antagonist.
Am enjoying . . .
True Grit by Charles Portis. The movie with John Wayne was a faithful adaptation, although Wikipedia lists the differences, if you’re curious. Oh, and the Coen brothers are doing a remake, with Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon as LaBouef (the Glenn Campbell role). Newcomer Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross (the Kim Darby role). Hard to see how they could improve or even rival the John Wayne version, but I suspect the Coen brothers might make a fair show of it.
You writers: take a look at True Grit (the novel) if you get the chance. Masterful characterization.
D.
Worst of the worst
I’m really enjoying Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which I’m reading as part of The Classic Slave Narratives. Douglass had a remarkable intellect, which is evident even in the first few pages of his autobiography. Because the premise of my embryonic alt history involves both slavery and religion, I’ve been particularly attentive to Douglass’s thoughts in that regard. This passage piqued my interest:
Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,–a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,–a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,–and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.
Berkeley Digital Library has Douglass’s Narrative in full text here. This should be required reading for high school US History students, or at the very least the AP students. Probably too much to ask that US History textbooks quote liberally from this work, since Texas controls textbook content in this country.
This Christian Odyssey page contains an interesting discussion touching on the Old Testament-inspired theories prevalent during the 17th to 19th centuries, regarding Africans, blacks, and slavery. Probably the most common attitude was the “Hamite view,” which held that blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham (or possibly Canaan), whom Noah cursed for undressing him whilst the old Arkist was in his cups. But a curse of slavery for all generations to come has always seemed a bit extreme to me as a punishment for such a seemingly trivial offense, so I’ve always wondered if there was more to the story. Wikipedia’s article touches on the Talmudic interpretations, which delve deeper:
The Talmud deduces two possible explanations (attributed to Rab and Rabbi Samuel) for what Ham did to Noah to warrant the curse. (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 70a.) According to Rab, Ham castrated Noah on the basis that, since Noah cursed Ham by his fourth son Canaan, Ham must have injured Noah with respect to a fourth son, by emasculating him, thus depriving Noah of the possibility of a fourth son. According to Samuel, Ham sodomized Noah, on the analogy between “and he saw†written in two places in the Bible: With regard to Ham and Noah, it says, “And Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father (Noah)â€; while in Genesis 34:2, it says, “And when Shechem the son of Hamor saw her (Dinah), he took her and lay with her and defiled her.†According to this argument, similar abuse must have happened each time that the Bible uses the same language. The Talmud concludes that, in fact, “both indignities were perpetrated.”
In more recent times, some scholars have suggested that Ham may have had intercourse with his father’s wife. Under this interpretation, Canaan is cursed as the “product of Ham’s illicit union.”
If this discussion stirs a sense of deja vu, it may be because in Greek mythology, Chronos castrated his father, Uranus, and in Egyptian mythology, Osiris’s death and resurrection involve a somewhat more than symbolic castration in the form of a missing penis.
But I digress. The point Douglass makes here and elsewhere is that religious slave owners were adept at using religion to justify their worst excesses; elsewhere, he discusses an overseer (if I remember correctly) whose knowledge of the Bible seemed limited to a passage enjoining slaveholders to punish their disobedient slaves with the lash.
Slaveholders in Douglass’s account seem more than a little ambivalent about providing their slaves with religion. I suspect a good part of that ambivalence related to their desire to keep their slaves ignorant and illiterate, a goal that runs contrary to the judaeochristian tradition, in which textual study is a core value. Indeed, one of the common tropes of the slave narrative is that literacy will set you free: the slave’s acquisition of reading and writing was instrumental to his eventual emancipation.
So here’s my thought, the kernel of an idea which I think could spawn a corker of a novel: aside from a desire for freedom, what other ideas might a group of slaves derive from a careful reading of the Old Testament?
D.
What’s not to like?
About a week ago, I finished Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel The Sparrow, which won all kinds of awards and, as far as I’m concerned, deserved them all.
The Sparrow is a first contact novel in which the Society of Jesus engages with intelligent life in the Alpha Centauri system, on the planet Rakhat. From the prologue, which concludes with the ominous, “They meant no harm,” you might think you know the end of this story; and indeed, it’s clear from the first pages that the Stella Maris’s crew met with disaster. Only one crew member survives — Emilio Sandoz, Puerto Rican Jesuit, bastard and baseball player, would-be saint and all-around nice guy — and he stands accused of murder and prostitution. The man is a PR nightmare.
The story is told with two intertwining narrative threads, one beginning with the discovery of extraterrestrial song by a SETI scientist working at Arecibo, Puerto Rico in 2019, the other beginning in 2059 with the Church’s hurried attempts to sequester Sandoz from the public eye. That Sandoz in 2059 is a changed man relative to Sandoz in 2019 (albeit just a few years older, thanks to relativistic effects) is evident from the outset. The younger priest wrestles with an imperfect faith but is otherwise joyful, while the older Sandoz gives damaged a whole new dimension. The mystery and much of the narrative drive stems from the questions: what happened to Sandoz (and the rest of the crew), and will he ever be whole again?
For much of the book, Russell’s pacing and characterization are masterful. I was grateful that she let me know upfront that all would end in tragedy because she does a stupendous job developing her eight crew men and women. Even knowing the outcome, I cared deeply for all of them, most of all Sandoz, and their fate was heartbreaking.
Yes, The Sparrow is a tearjerker, but it’s so much more: it’s a study of cultures not so much in conflict as in confusion; an exploration of sexuality and religion, of the bonds of family and friends, of the relationship of people with their God. All that, and yet it never felt “talky” or “preachy” (not at all like a Heinlein novel, in other words). Best of all, Russell respects the reader enough to explore these ideas without putting forward her own biases, at least not in any obvious way, and with her ending she offers no easy answers.
Not a perfect novel by any stretch, though. Mostly I was bothered by the rushed feeling in the last fifty pages. Major traumatic events happen off camera, told secondhand, as if Russell didn’t have the heart to write the scenes, or perhaps she didn’t think her readers would have the heart to read them. After a few hundred pages of masterful stonewalling, Sandoz gives his Jesuit inquisitors what they’ve wanted all along — his version of events — and the shift feels precipitous. And this is a book with an all too brief denouement, leaving the reader with a major WTF moment at the end. (Good planning on Russell’s part, though, since I instantly bought the sequel, Children of God. The usual story . . . dying to know what happens next.)
As for the sequel, I suppose I should reserve judgment until the end, but 3/4 of the way through I feel like Russell should have taken Elmore Leonard’s dictum to heart (cut the stuff that others skip). I’m glad I bought it because it does give a sense of closure to The Sparrow, and I understand why Children of God is flawed. Russell, I think, really wanted to tell the whole story of what happened on Rakhat following the debacle of the first Jesuit mission, so the sequel is in many ways more of a history than a novel. The focus had to shift from one riveting character to a number of folks who shaped a planet’s history. There’s a loss of dramatic punch in such a gear-change, and face it, histories aren’t as much fun as novels.
The Sparrow may not be the best book for the hard SF fan. The aliens are not terribly alien and the planet never feels like much more than a country the size of Denmark (no, not even when the Stella Maris is surveying it from above). Russell never falls into the It was raining on Mars trap, but I could tell world-building was not her strength when she wrote this. Culture-building, yes, and character-creation, absolutely. But world-building? Nope.
Enough complaints, though. This was one of those rare books that I had to read in every spare moment — a book that became more important to me than videogaming. What higher compliment can I pay it? And it had more genuine feeling to it, more pathos and poignancy, joy and sorrow, than any book I’ve read in a long time.
If you do read it, let me know what you think 😉
D.
I love this guy
Huston makes me wish I were writing again. He’s that good. In his words I can sense the joy of creation, the satisfaction of craft well executed. I wish I were at it again.
Sleepless tells the story of undercover cop Parker Haas. It’s 2010, and the world is afflicted with a communicable prion disease (you know — like scrapie, CJD, mad cow . . .) that makes its victims sleepless, while slowly turning their brains into Swiss cheese. It’s invariably fatal, but takes its sweet time in killing; patients become confused and agitated, lose track of the past versus the present, and eventually descend into a terminal mode known as “the suffering.” The only thing that gives relief is DR33M3R, a drug that is in short supply. Haas has been tasked with uncovering the black market in DR33M3R.
The sleepless plague has warped the world, which is now descending into anarchic hell as a result. The Los Angeles of Sleepless is a minutely detailed war zone populated with gangs and militias, Blackwater-style hired guns, neo-Christian suicide bombers, the desperate and the rich and the desperate rich. Not too far from the real thing, in other words.
Haas’s wife is sleepless, and his infant daughter might be as well. And Haas — has he gone without sleep because he takes amphetamines to keep moving, or is he, like many sleepless victims, taking amphetamines to stave off the illness’s hallmark confusion?
Multiple murders at an MMORPG gold farm guide Haas towards the top of the DR33M3R food chain, but he’s not alone in his pursuit. He’s on a collision course with Jasper (no last name), one of the most cleverly drawn hit man characters I’ve read or seen in many years. Think of Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson’s hit man from The Mechanic) with even more sophistication and cynicism. Like Haas, Jasper is terribly likable, even if you might not want him anywhere near your family. A great deal of the novel’s appeal comes from the suspense of not knowing what will happen when the two finally meet.
There’s very little not to like here: the depth of Huston’s world-building and character development are impressive, the plotting is tight, the action sequences are well choreographed and compelling. Huston’s good guy isn’t squeaky-clean good, and his bad guys are anything but cartoonishly evil. In fact, they’re likable folks, and their self justifications seem oh-so reasonable. Huston delights in gray areas.
I’ll have to admit that I can quibble with Huston’s understanding of protein chemistry, but hard SF geeks drive me nuts, so I had better not become one of them.
Ultimately, my measure of a good book is whether I cared about the characters and whether I enjoyed the experience. Moreso the latter, of course (I mean, think of a Piers Anthony Xanth book: it’s hard to feel anything for his characters, but that’s not the point. He still provides a fun ride). Sleepless scores on both points.
So how many times do I have to keep hawking Huston to get you guys to try his stuff? This guy is good, people. He needs to be read.
And so I’m about to start another one of his books.
D.
Re: innovation
From Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, by way of an old post on The Daily Galaxy . . .
Despite the myths, innovations rarely involve someone working alone, and never in history has an invention been made without reusing ideas from the past. For all of our chronocentric glee, our newest ideas have historic roots: the term network is 500 years old, webs were around before the human race, and the algorithmic DNA is more elegant and powerful than any programming language. Wise innovators–driven by passion more than ego–initiate partnerships, collaborations, and humble studies of the past, raising their odds against the timeless challenges of innovation.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
D.